


Drifting

by cedarbranch



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Ficlet, Gen, The Drift (Pacific Rim), less of a character study than a concept study, this isn't shippy but always read anything i write through a newmann lens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21637846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cedarbranch/pseuds/cedarbranch
Summary: The drift is different for everyone.Newt's surprised to hear Mako's account of it. A heady silence, one long, endless flow of information minus sound. It makes him shiver.His drift has never been silent.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler & Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Drifting

**Author's Note:**

> heLLo there do i have any idea what i am doing posting this? no. it has been several months since i wrote it and i intended to just let it gather dust in my google drive forever but i'm itching to post Something so here u go, have this drabble i wrote because from the first time i heard raleigh say "the drift is silence" i've always thought he was wrong.

The drift is different for everyone.

Newt's surprised to hear Mako's account of it. A heady silence, one long, endless flow of information minus sound. It makes him shiver. 

His drift has never been silent. 

His drift is chaos, speeding highways and crashing cars and the garbled chatter of a thousand voices at once, a blast furnace melting memories together until they drip and run in rivulets down his collective consciousness. The earth shakes and collapses into itself and shakes again, a looped implosion, dominoes falling and thundering as they rise to fall again, the sound rolling through his eardrums like the kick drum of his first band and the rumble of his chalkboard moving across the floor while his lab partner shouts at him and he shouts back and both of them shout and it's so _loud._

It would be wrong if it were silent, and the drift is anything but wrong. It's right. It's as infinitely, incomprehensibly right as the first stinging kiss of a needle to his skin, carving stories and dreams and existential dread into his very flesh. It's like the first letter he wrote and the first he received in reply--he was manic, he didn't know what he was starting and he sure as hell didn’t expect it to end up like this, but here they are, and here they shall forever be. It was almost serendipitous. He was so frustrated at the hypotheses he couldn't solve when a new one presented himself, just as unsolvable and just as frustrating but so much more interesting. 

The drift is spinning. The drift is being. For every moment he’s spent careening down the tangents of his own mind, the drift steals his breath and fills his head with cacophonies that are not his own. For every moment he’s spent forcing numbers to yield and give up their prophecies, forcing his legs to carry him, forcing himself to keep going for just one more day because the world fucking needs him, Newton Geiszler Hermann Gottlieb Geiszler Gottlieb Geiszler and _something else,_ the drift yanks him out of his head and throws him. 

Silence is what fills an empty body when the last soft breath escapes. Silence is unnerving, like the hum of the electric lights in the lab without that bloody moron’s voice to fill it because he’s too busy seizing on the ground, like the soul-shock of realizing he has no retort this time, he has nothing, nothing but a vacancy in the air and something terrifying trying to fill it. 

The drift is screaming, and it is the most comforting sound the world has to offer, because as long as it screams, it has not died just yet.


End file.
